Swedish authorities probe Oracle Cerner health record rollout Oracle's electronic health records system is under scrutiny by multiple Swedish authorities after a $190 million rollout in the Västra Götaland region (VGR) encountered significant issues. Following local media reports, the regional government in western Sweden confirmed several problems involving the Cerner Millennium …
Anonymous as I have old colleagues who have worked in the implementation project for the southern region in Sweden. This region is still planning to go live with its version of the system early next year.
From what I've heard, the project has been a right mess all the way along and people with any self-preservation instincts have bailed on it when they could. Local medical personnel who have been part of the pilot have been interviewed in local papers; their reaction has been that they are starting to understand that there's been little or no live testing because the system wasn't running well enough to be tested.
It's been suggested by local IT people that a monolithic system originally developed for a highly bureaucratic USA hospital management structure in the 1990s was never going to be able to be adapted to the relatively decentralised and flat Swedish management structure. Local pilot users have complained that there are many more decision and approval layers than are needed for local conditions, for example.
Local regional leaders seem to have been more inclined to listen to the Oracle sales team than to their own people, but that is nothing new.
It's a little disturbing following the story, but I'm not surprised given what I've heard about it over the years. I saw a day or two ago that the first payment from the VGR region to Oracle had been delayed, but I guess it's too much to hope for that it gets blocked indefinitely.
WRONG.
Anything large is always going to be different in other places. Its not about American hospital management being different, im sure many hospitals in USA are also very different and switching from their current system to this one wouldnt work as well.
The world is full of unique orgnisations and peoples, we are not the same, pretending that we are is bogus.
The world is full of people trying to achieve the same tasks and for reasons of pride, ignorance and ego want to pretend that their way is superior, special, clearly the best. A classic human behavior problem. There's good reason why accounting has a Globally Accepted Accounting Proceedure (GAAP) so that shareholders, audit and regulatory can compare every company consistently. One size must fit all, and it does.
The same is true of logistics, HR and supply chain processes that include many standard best practice variants. Pretending that they should be different is the classic recipe for cost, time and risk overrun.
Choose from the menu, don't tell the Chef how to cook.
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